Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A woodwind instrument with a single-reed mouthpiece and a usually curved conical metal tube, including soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone sizes.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A musical instrument, properly of the clarinet class, but with a metal tube like a trumpet or horn, invented by Adolphe Sax about 1840.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Mus.) A wind instrument of brass, containing a reed, and partaking of the qualities both of a brass instrument and of a clarinet.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun music A single-reed instrument musical instrument of the woodwind family, usually made of brass and with a distinctive loop bringing the bell upwards

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a single-reed woodwind with a conical bore

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[After Sax, surname of 19th-century Belgian instrument-making family.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Borrowing from French saxophone, a combination of the surname of its inventor Adolphe Sax (1814–1894) + -o- + -phone ("phone"), from Ancient Greek φωνή (fōnḗ, "voice")

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